We shall, in this lecture, see that phrases and sentences are built up by a series of merger operations, each

of which combines a pair of constituents together to form a larger constituent. We will learn how the
resulting structure can be represented in terms of a tree diagram. We look at some of the principles which
underlie sentence formation, and explore ways of testing the structure of phrases and sentences.
PHRASES
To put our discussion on a concrete footing, let’s consider how an elementary two-word phrase such as
the italicised response produced by speaker B in the following mini-dialogue is formed:
(1) SPEAKER A: What are you trying to do? SPEAKER B: Help you

As speaker b’s utterance illustrates, the simplest way of forming a phrase is by merging (a technical term
meaning ‘combining’) two words together: for example, by merging the word help with the word you in
(1), we form the phrase help you. The resulting phrase help you seems to have verb-like rather than
pronoun-like properties, as we see from the fact that it can occupy the same range of positions as the
simple verb help, and hence, e.g., occur after the infinitive particle to: cf.
(2) (a) We are trying to help (b) We are trying to help you

By contrast, the phrase help you cannot occupy the same kind of position as a pronoun such as you, as we
see from (3) below:
(3) (a) You are very difficult (b) *Help you are very difficult

So, it seems clear that the grammatical properties of a phrase like help you are determined by the verb
help, and not by the pronoun you. Much the same can be said about the semantic properties of the
expression, since the phrase help you describes an act of help, not a kind of person. Using the appropriate
technical terminology, we can say that the verb help is the head of the phrase help you, and hence that
help you is a Verb Phrase: and in the same way as we abbreviate category labels like verb to V, so too
we can abbreviate the category label Verb Phrase to VP. If we use the traditional labelled bracketing
technique to represent the category of the overall Verb Phrase help you and of its constituent words (the
verb help and the pronoun you), we can represent the structure of the resulting phrase as in (4) below:

An alternative (equivalent) way of representing the structure of phrases like help you is via a labelled tree
diagram such as (5) below (which is a bit like a family tree diagram – albeit for a small family):

What the tree diagram in (5) tells us is that the overall phrase help you is a Verb Phrase (VP), and that its
two constituents are the verb (V) help and the pronoun (PRN) you. The verb help is the head of the
overall phrase (and so is the key word which determines the grammatical and semantic properties of the
phrase help you). Introducing another technical term at this point, we can say that conversely, the VP help
you is a projection of the verb help, in the sense that the verb help is projected into a larger structure by
merging it with another constituent of an appropriate kind. In this case, the constituent which is merged
with the verb help is the pronoun you, which has the grammatical function of being the (direct object)
complement of the verb help. The head of a projection/phrase determines grammatical properties of its
complement: in this instance, since help is a transitive verb, it requires a complement with accusative
case (e.g. a pronoun like me, us, him, them), and this requirement is satisfied here since you can function
as an accusative form. The tree diagram in (5) is entirely equivalent to the labelled bracketing in (4), in
the sense that the two provide us with precisely the same information about the structure of the phrase
help you. The differences between a labelled bracketing like (4) and a tree diagram like (5) are purely
notational: each category is represented by a single labelled node in a tree diagram (i.e. by a point in the
tree which carries a category label like VP, V or PRN), but by a pair of labelled brackets in a labelled
bracketing.
Since our goal in developing a theory of Universal Grammar is to uncover general structural principles
governing the formation of phrases and sentences, let’s generalise our discussion of (5) at this point and
hypothesise that all phrases are formed in essentially the same way as the phrase in (5), namely by a
binary (i.e. pairwise) merger operation which combines two constituents together to form a larger
constituent. In the case of (5), the resulting phrase help you is formed by merging two words. However,
not all phrases contain only two words – as we see if we look at the structure of the italicised phrase
produced by speaker B in (6) below:

The phrase in (6b) is formed by merging the infinitive particle to with the Verb Phrase help you. What is
the head of the resulting phrase to help you? A reasonable guess would be that the head is the infinitival
tense particle/T to, so that the resulting expression to help you is an infinitival TP (= infinitival tense
projection = infinitival tense phrase). This being so, we’d expect to find that TPs containing infinitival to
occur in a different range of positions from VPs/Verb Phrases – and this is indeed the case, as we see
from the contrast below:

If we assume that help you is a VP whereas to help you is a TP, we can account for the contrasts in (7)
and (8) by saying that ought is the kind of word which selects (i.e. ‘takes’) an infinitival TP as its
complement, whereas should is the kind of word which selects an infinitival VP as its complement.
Implicit in this claim is the assumption that different words like ought and should have different
selectional properties which determine the range of complements which they can take.
The infinitive phrase to help you is formed by merging the infinitive particle to with the VP help you. If
infinitival to is an infinitival tense particle (belonging to the category T) and if to is the head of the
phrase to help you, the structure formed by merging to with the VP help you in (5) will be the TP in (9)
below:

The head of the resulting infinitival tense projection to help you is the infinitive particle to, and the Verb
Phrase help you is the complement of to; conversely, to help you is a projection of to. In keeping with
the earlier observation that ‘The head of a projection/phrase determines grammatical properties of its
complement’, the infinitival tense particle to requires an infinitival VP as its complement: more
specifically, to requires the head V of its VP complement to be a verb in its infinitive form, so that we
require the (bare/uninflected) infinitive form help after infinitival to (and not an inflected form like
helping/ helped/helps). Refining our earlier observation somewhat, we can therefore say that ‘The head of
a projection/phrase determines grammatical properties of the head word of its complement.’ In (9), to is
the head of the TP to help you, and the complement of to is the VP help you; the head of this VP is the V
help, so that to determines the form of the V help (requiring it to be in the infinitive form help).
More generally, our discussion here suggests that we can build up phrases by a series of binary merger
operations which combine successive pairs of constituents to form ever larger structures. For example, by
merging the infinitive phrase to help you with the verb trying, we can form the even larger italicised
phrase trying to help you produced by speaker B in (10) below:

The resulting phrase trying to help you is headed by the verb trying, as we see from the fact that it can be
used after words like be, start or keep which select a complement headed by a verb in the -ing form (cf.
They were/started/kept trying to help you). This being so, the italicised phrase produced by speaker B in
(10) is a VP (= Verb Phrase) which has the structure (11) below:

(11) tells us (amongst other things) that the overall expression trying to help you is a VP; its head is the V
trying, and the complement of trying is the TP to help you: conversely, the VP trying to help you is a
projection of the V trying. An interesting property of syntactic structures which is illustrated in (11) is
that of recursion – that is, the property of allowing a given structure to contain more than one instance of
a given category (in this case, more than one VP – one VP headed by the verb help and another VP
headed by the verb trying).
Since our goal in developing a theory of UG is to attempt to establish universal principles governing the
nature of linguistic structure, an important question to ask is whether there are any general principles of
constituent structure which we can abstract from structures like (5, 9, 11). If we look closely at the
relevant structures, we can see that they obey the following two (putatively universal) constituent
structure principles:
(A terminal node is one at the foot/bottom of a tree, whereas a non-terminal node is one which branches
down into other nodes: consequently, the V-trying, T-to, V-help and PRN-you in 11 are terminal nodes
because they do not branch down into any other node; by contrast, the VP and TP constituents are
nonterminal because they branch down into other nodes.) For example, the structure (11) obeys the
Headedness Principle (12) in that the VP help you is headed by the V help, the TP to help you is headed
by the T to, and the VP trying to help you is headed by the V trying. Likewise, (11) obeys the Binarity
Principle (13) in that the VP help you branches into two immediate constituents (in the sense that it has
two constituents immediately beneath it, namely the V help and the PRN you), the TP to help you
branches into two immediate constituents (the nonfinite tense particle T to and the VP help you), and the
VP trying to help you likewise branches into two immediate constituents (the V trying and the TP
to help you). Our discussion thus leads us towards a principled account of constituent structure – i.e. one
based on a set of principles of Universal Grammar.
There are several reasons for trying to uncover constituent structure principles like (12) and (13). From a
learnability perspective, such principles reduce the range of alternatives which children have to choose
between when trying to determine the structure of a given kind of expression: they therefore help us
develop a more constrained theory of syntax. Moreover, additional support for the Binarity Principle
comes from evidence that phonological structure is also binary, in that (e.g.) a syllable like bat has a
binary structure, consisting of the onset |b| and the rhyme |at|, and the rhyme in turn has a binary
structure, consisting of the nucleus |a| and the coda |t| – vertical bars being used to enclose sounds or
sequences of sounds. Likewise, there is evidence that morphological structure is also binary, and hence
(e.g.) that the noun indecipherability is formed by adding the prefix de- to the noun cipher to form the
verb decipher; then adding the suffix -able to this verb to form the adjective decipherable; then adding
the prefix in- to this adjective to form the adjective indecipherable; and then adding the suffix -ity to the
resulting adjective to form the noun indecipherability. It would thus seem that binarity is an inherent
characteristic of the phonological, morphological and syntactic structure of natural languages.